"Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue."

"And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light."

"Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?"

"Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom"

"The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie."

"For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat."

"Everything measurable passes, everything that can be counted has an end. Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears."

"Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough."

"Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart."

"Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance."

"Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?"

"To be simple is no small matter."

"When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women"

"She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better."

"Read in order to live."

"In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up."

"Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings."

"One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table."

"She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage."

"(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust."

"I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it."

"For her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart."

"It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols."

"God is in the details."

"Emma was no asleep, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was dozing off at her side, she lay awake, dreaming other dreams."

"And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate."

"It was the fault of destiny!"

"On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters."

"My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real."

"Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence."

"For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb."

"Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art."

"He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him."

"As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop."

"What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless."

"Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature."

"The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel."

"… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!"

"Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex..."

"There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going."

"Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer."

"One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us."

"I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life"

"My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid."